Meet the Michael Jordan of Sport Coding

pacopico writes: Gennady Korotkevich — aka Tourist — has spent a decade ruling the world of sport coding. He dominates TopCoder, Codeforces and just about every tournament sponsored by the likes of Google and Facebook. Bloomberg has profiled Korotkevich's rise through the sport coding ranks and taken a deep look at what makes this sport weirdly wonderful. The big takeaway from the piece seems to be that sport coding has emerged as a way for very young coders to make names for themselves and get top jobs — sometimes by skipping college altogether.

Comments

Sigh

[ledow]

Man makes name for himself in industry after years of hard work, study, diligent research - not fucking news.

Man is briefly fastest coder after leaving school because he can't cope with having to learn a bit of history alongside his talents - fucking news.

Stop this shit, because Kid who is briefly fastest coder could have gone to fucking school, even specialist computing school, and been an even better coder.

But that's not fucking news, is it?

Re:Interesting subject, lousy article

[msobkow]

... just problem solving in all its pure elegance and source code in all its unhindered, non-process, non-styleguide'd glory.

There are rarely such isolated problems in the real world, though. Real programs are far larger and more complex than those produced by these coding competitions. The fact that you can win a coding competition doesn't really say much of anything about your ability to integrate systems, deal with incompatibilities, or to work with other team members.

In short, winning a coding competition doesn't say bugger all about your skill as an employable programmer.